


aurora

by myrosebudboy



Category: Carry On - Fandom, Rainbow Rowell - Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-11-13
Packaged: 2018-05-01 11:05:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5203457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrosebudboy/pseuds/myrosebudboy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>i just wanted to write about agatha wellbelove</p>
            </blockquote>





	aurora

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: this may be kind of bad because it’s pretty late and i just wanted to write something about agatha because i feel like she’s a character with a lot of depth to explore. so here you go sorry if it makes zero sense

Agatha Wellbelove is the loveliest witch at Watford.

Everyone knows that. She knows it, too. She’s plenty aware of it. Long, fair hair, wide, soft brown eyes, tall and willowy, yet just the right height for a girl (which she’s never particularly understood the meaning of – she’d much rather be tall than have her head at a guy’s shoulder level). Elegant, beautiful, the very idea of what a girl should be.

She fights for herself. She struggles to get good grades, stays up late reading about magickal theory, nearly exhausts herself trying to cast spells. She hates that her magic isn’t like Penny’s, an endless reservoir of focused magic, or a sharp, burning arrow, like Baz’s. All she can do is hold her concentration there as long as she can, and nearly collapse after. But of course she doesn’t collapse, because she’s Agatha Wellbelove, and if she’ll never be good at anything else, this is the one thing she has.

She takes on responsibilities. She volunteers for so many things and she’s assigned so much and she suggests even more and she’s near to drowning and sometimes she has to dart to the bathroom to have a quiet cry because she can’t deal with it all. But after a while she gives up and she learns how to discreetly wipe away her own tears and how to not show how much it stings when people teasingly tell her ‘don’t cry so much, Agatha’ at the end of every year when their yearbooks come and she asks them to sign it.

She doesn’t say it out loud, but she hates it.

-

Agatha Wellbelove is the loveliest witch at Watford.

She wears red lipstick, painted across her lips boldly like war paint, and she learns just how to tuck her hair behind her ear so it looks carelessly graceful. She learns to sit straight and elongate her back, learns how to tilt her head just that much to let her look poised. She learns how to charm people with the proper words and how to read them like a book. She learns how easily people are distracted, and how easily secrets can flow from mouths. And if she can’t cast spells as well as other mages, she has this. So she uses it, uses it like it’s the last arrow she has in her quiver and she’s only got one chance to fire it, and she tries to not let her hands shake.

She’s a perfectionist, she’ll admit. She won’t let herself rest until she’s got the spell down, has the essay completely edited and copied neatly onto a fresh sheet of paper, rearranges her side of her room over and over again so that the light hits everything just perfectly. She plans her wardrobe down to the last accessory every night before she goes to bed so there will be one less thing to rush about in the morning. Sometimes, it borders on paranoia, and she’ll check the same thing about ten times to make sure that it’s in place even though she knows in her heart that it is.

She doesn’t say it out loud, but she hates it.

-

Agatha Wellbelove is the loveliest witch at Watford.

She leaves her fair hair long because when she was younger she thought long hair made a princess a princess. And now she’s older and she knows better but she won’t – can’t – let it go, can’t bring herself to cut her hair. So she leaves it in a long sheet hanging to her waist and she wears white billowy dresses because it makes her feel like a princess and it’s her way of escaping the world, of looking beautiful and untouchable and _beautiful_ , and maybe one day everything will fall into place and she will have a fairytale to call her own even though she knows she will never be the kind of person to willingly be the simpering princess in the classic tales where they never do anything other than be used as a plot device.

And the younger girls look at her with admiration and longing and she feels awful every time she walks past them because once while she hid in a toilet stall she overheard a little third-year sounding heartbroken over her own dark curls and slight pudginess. And she knows that some of the younger girls don’t eat because they think it makes them prettier and she hates this world for making them believe they have to starve themselves, be a bag of skin and bones to satisfy a hunger that isn’t even theirs to be responsible for. And they are so much more than pieces in someone else’s life and she wants to tell them, wants to look into their eyes and make them believe it, but she knows they’ll never believe her, especially not if they hear it from her. 

She likes pink, and she wears lace dresses, and she has fair hair and warm brown eyes alight with life, and she sits just the right way, and everyone thinks she is nothing more than what she looks like, a pretty mannequin perched there waiting for her prince to sweep her off her feet.

She doesn’t say it out loud, but she hates it.

-

Agatha Wellbelove is the loveliest witch at Watford.

She’s lost.

You’d think she’s the ideal beauty of the campus. And she is, no doubt. But people are not just their appearance. But people do not have personalities that are determined by what they wear, how tall they are, or what colour their eyes are. But she doesn’t want to be just her appearance. She draws her eyeliner with ferocity and her eyes can turn as hard as flint. She’s in the library almost as much as Penelope Bunce, and she’s fairly sure she puts in twice as much effort.

But no one cares, because she’s not wired for knowledge, not built for great magic. She isn’t the confident, loud, intelligent girl. She’s the pretty face at the side. And she’s been trying to change that, because she’s so much more. She knows she is so much more. But it yields nothing, and no one cares. And she doesn’t know what to do.

She doesn’t say it out loud, but she hates it.

-

Agatha Wellbelove is the loveliest witch at Watford.

She keeps a map in her room, of places that she wants to visit some day. She arranges flowers in a small vase on her bedside table, and she arranges her bookshelf by alphabetical order and her closet by colour. She has nightmares of everything falling and collapsing around her and drowning in a dizzying spiral of confusion and she wakes up at five in the morning with pounding headaches and wishing that she doesn’t have to get up, not ever.

Simon told her about the story of a princess who had fair hair who pricked her finger on a cursed spindle when she was sixteen and fell into a cursed sleep for a hundred years. She ponders if Sleeping Beauty wore white dresses, and she wonders if she could sleep for a hundred years, too. Maybe a thousand years. Maybe forever.

She’s the light at their gatherings and in their conversations. Sit upright, shoulders back, artfully curl up a corner of your mouth, soften your eyes. Make conversation. Be the supporting act. So she stuffs these shadows away into the deepest corners of herself and she smiles like the lovely girl she’s supposed to play the part of.

She doesn’t say it out loud, but she hates it.

-

Agatha Wellbelove was the loveliest witch at Watford.

She never says it out loud, but she’s learned to hate it, hate herself, hate her warped version of reality because she knows she’s got it all twisted but she can’t find any way to untwist it.

So when someone tells her to run, she does.

Her white dresses are folded and stuffed into a corner of her wardrobe. She cuts her hair until it rests gently against her shoulders and she curls the ends for good measure, and she pretends not to hear when her hairdresser bemoans the inches of pale blonde hair that fall to the floor. She shoves her heels away and hides her wand in a corner of her bookshelf where she’s confident no one will ever find it.

She wears sundresses now, and strappy sandals that tie around her ankles. She lives in San Diego. Her friends work in restaurants and strip mall office buildings, and she dates boys who wear dark stocking caps, even on warm days. On weeknights, she studies, and on weekends, they go to the beach. She spends the money her parents give her on tuition and tacos.

And it’s not her happily ever after, but she was never made for those, anyway.


End file.
